Social Media – 4 Ways to Gain Interactive Followers in 2017

While it may seem vain to want to attract a whole lot of social media followers, the effort does have a proportional effect on how widespread your message becomes and the quantity you convert.

Follower numbers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ are one of the monitoring metrics companies track on social media reports.

There’s a good deal of valuable advice available on the best way to boost your following on social networking. You may be wondering how, specifically, can you raise your number of followers? Which distinguishing tactics can you take today to cultivate your follower numbers?

Before we get into the research-backed procedures for growing your audience base, let’s begin with some best practices for follower development. You will encounter these ideas when searching for social networking hints or read up on how other companies attracted the followers that they did.

Post great content

Use hashtags

Put a widget on your website

Engage with others

Make sure that your content is shareable

Stay active

Follow other users

There is lots of really good information here on what works and what does not concerning adding followers. These strategies are great for the consistent development of your followers, and most of the advice you’ll read will be variants on several of these bullet points.

You might have noticed that there’s not any single, easy hack to get more followers. There is no switch to flip to get the followers flowing. These tactics do work for assembling your follower count, so long as it is possible to remain patient, determined, and constant.

But while there is no quick solution, there’s at least a whole lot of research that may take you down the correct path and be certain your efforts aren’t in vain. On the lookout for a surefire way to get more followers? There’s a fantastic blueprint in this information.

A research study at Rutgers University discovered that only 20 percent of social media users are informers, while the remaining 80 percent are actually, meformers.

A meformer posts regular updates relating mainly to themselves

Informers are focused mostly on sharing relevant information

The Rutgers team crafted the phrase “meformer” after evaluating data from a sampling of Tweets. Their analysis, established on patterns of use together with follower and tweet information, found an obvious split between people who share relevant information and users who share about themselves.

Informers had over twice the followers of meformers. Therefore, followers prefer shared relevant information on social networking rather than posts about yourself.

Action Step #1

Boost your information sharing on social media platforms so that you line up more closely with the informers instead of the meformers.

What do attention-getters like Perry and Obama share besides fame? They’re creators, trendsetters, and leaders. They create and make a difference, that is what sets them apart. He even went so far as to draft a useful pyramid to illustrate the hierarchy of greatness on Twitter. This illustration can be applied to other social media platforms with a few tweaks.

This intriguing idea is made even stronger with some statistics to back this up. Dan Zarella, a data scientist, researched the impact of authority in a Twitter bio. Have you ever heard variations on the theme of “do not call yourself a guru”? Zarella found this statement to be untrue. Self-proclaimed gurus have about 100 more interactive social followers than the average Twitter user. Besides ‘guru”, many different sorts of authoritative names can help increase your number of followers.

Action Step #2

Create compelling posts and be a thought leader in your niche. Remember to include this info in your bio. Authoritative titles like official, writer, creator, and expert are very attractive to viewers and may serve to be strong assets when it comes to growing your following.

To keep the interactive followers you have, avoid sending out bursts of information. A big part of maintaining a large follower base is knowing how to keep them happy.

A Korean research group conducted a compelling study on why social media users unfollow. They examined over a million active accounts on Twitter and reviewed more than 50 days’ worth of interactions. Their interviews and research analysis uncovered the following factors:

Bombarding followers with an excessive number of updates in short window of time

Irrelevant or boring topics

Sharing boring details of an individual’s personal life

Over half of the unfollows observed resulted due to too many bursts, or too many posts in a short period of time.

Action Step #3

Earn a large interactive following by minimizing how many users unfollow your account. Use a scheduler to send out updates and avoid posting bursts. Stay away from boring or mundane topics.

Over half of all social media followers want to receive special offers, so give your audience what they want. If your brand is aggressive trying to build a larger following, you first need to know what will bring them to you. Recent research has revealed that the top 10 reasons why interactive followers choose specific brands:

55 percent will a brand because they like it

52 percent follow for coupons, special offers or promotions

51 percent follow a brand for stay up to date company and product news

Of the top 10 reasons to follow a brand, one of the biggest draws was money-saving deals. Followers liked freebies, exclusive content, special offers, and promotions. The compelling, informative, useful or entertaining content was seventh on the list of reasons to follow a brand on social media. Therefore, gaining followers isn’t just about providing great marketing content.

Action Step #4

Offer free things to your followers. Users love freebies and discounts and are more likely to follow a brand that dishes out some sort of incentive. If you can incorporate value in this way, with great branding and content, your number of interactive followers will increase.

About Sean Donahoe

Sean is one of the most recognized industry leaders in business and marketing. As a popular speaker, author, consultant he has helped over 50,000 students world wide find success in their businesses and has consulted with Fortune 500 companies and businesses of every size grow and thrive...